Читать книгу The Pelman System of Mind and Memory Training - Lessons I to XII - Анон - Страница 32

28. A good deal is heard now-a-days of “overstrain.” This condition is far more often the result of wrong methods than of excessive work. The normal brain has an extraordinary capacity for knowledge, and its most serious danger lies not in activity but in worry. With regard to the avoidance of worry, it is more easy to give advice than to follow it. Should you be faced with any cause for anxiety, try to bear continually in mind the fact that worry can never in the smallest degree help in any situation, but that it can, and usually does, render one less competent to meet a crisis or difficulty by lowering the vitality and confusing the brain. You have one trouble: why take on another—the burden of worry? If calamity does come, determine that you will learn from it some lesson, whether of courage, or of patience, or of resource. In this way you may possibly make your gain in character more than balance your loss in other directions. True happiness, after all, depends infinitely more upon ourselves than upon our surroundings. The temporal possessions you have striven for and won so hardly may be taken away, but the priceless treasures of imagination none can wrest from you. Your body may be imprisoned in a dungeon, while your mind still enjoys the freedom of the Universe. When misfortune overtakes you, never gaze back on the opportunities of the past, but concentrate your attention on the opportunities of the future. Although instances of genuine mental overstrain unconnected with worry are extraordinarily rare, a sense of weariness may accrue from prolonged mental application. This may be avoided to a great extent if five minutes’ rest can be taken in every hour. Merely to rise from your seat and stretch your limbs will afford marked relief.